The main premise arose from discontent with Cameron Mitchell's stated backstory. In Stargate SG-1, he was raised in Kansas, although his actor believed him to be from the South. Clan Mitchell sets Cameron's childhood home in Black Mountain, North Carolina, with a large extended military family. His parents are changed from Frank and Wendy (in the TV series) to Everett and Sassy. Although Everett closely resembles Frank from the TV series, Sassy is considerably more authoritative and outspoken than Wendy.

Clan Mitchell itself has several AUs. It made an early appearance in the Broken Wings AU, in which Cam never recovers properly from his injuries in Antarctica and starts a new life with Jack O'Neill's clone, the Cammieverse, in which Cameron Mitchell is female, and Mezzanine, a combination, in which Cammie doesn't recover from Antarctica.

Many readers have said that a good deal of Clan Mitchell fanfic, including Broken Wings, can be read without much knowledge of SG-1 canon. Several spinoff fanfics do not deal with SG-1 characters at all, choosing to focus instead on original characters who are in some way related to the Mitchells. Others focus on finding ways to integrate the original Mitchell characters with the series, for example, by making Teal'c friends with Gran'ma Mitchell, or theorizing that Cam and Samantha Carter met and became friends during the First Gulf War.

2010 incident

In June 2010, Synecdochic started a "Not-A-Kinkmeme" challenge on the clan mitchell dreamwidth community.[1] One fill, by slybrarian, offered a less charitable interpretation of the clan as "a highly pressurized, homogenous environment in which everyone is expected and raised to be part of the elite, where no one is normal and boring, and where there are no secrets and thus also no privacy."[2] Synecdochic was upset, Ivorygates reacted badly, other readers weighed in, and the whole incident made Fandom Wank.[2] A few days later, Synecdochic posted an apology and announced that Ivorygates had left the community.[3]